Until recently, I have been an Aquamacs user on the Mac. However, recently I have been switching back to a more standard Emacs distribution for Mac. After some time of research I ended up with the Emacs Mac Port. This distribution is easily installed and updated through Homebrew, and since I am already using Homebrew for other important software on my Mac (including bsdmake), this was an obvious choice. I use Homebrew to install the Emacs Mac Port from railwaycat with these commands:
brew tap railwaycat/emacsmacport brew install emacs-mac
Later, when I want to update to the latest release, I just do this:
brew update emacs-mac
Optionally, you can also create a soft-link in the Application directory to be able to access Emacs from there:
ln -s /usr/local/opt/emacs-mac/Emacs.app /Applications
Tips to run Emacs from command line prompt can be found here.
Since I want to have a more Mac feel to my Emacs on the Mac (used Aquamacs to long, I guess), the final configuration I suggest is to add support for typical Mac key bindings. I use a modified version of this mac-port-keys.el. My remapping of modifiers is changed to the following (use the function modifier key for meta since I need option modifier key for different key modifiers, including typing the Norwegian letters æ, ø and å):
(when (symbolp 'mac-control-modifier)
;; Re-map modifiers
(setq mac-control-modifier 'control
;mac-option-modifier 'meta ; (AA)
mac-function-modifier 'meta ; (AA)
mac-command-modifier 'super)
)
On my iMac keyboard, I do not have the function modifier key on a proper location, so I use Karabiner-Elements to map the unused Caps Lock key to the function modifier (the fn-key). I actually do this on all my Macs, since I never use Caps Locks and the meta key is used a lot in Emacs.
And I use Cua-Mode (but I disable the overriding of standard Emacs bindings):
;; Cua-mode (AA) (cua-mode t) (setq cua-enable-cua-keys nil) ; C-v and M-v to scroll!
